I have witnessed schools move from progressive practices such as inclusion, to the grouping of special education students with ELLs and other struggling learners into “double period” classes where they are drilled to pass the test.

When teachers begin losing their jobs based on test scores, how easy will it be to attract excellent teachers to schools with high degrees of student mobility and/or truancy? Who will want to teach English language learners with interrupted education, or students with emotional disabilities that make their performance on tests unpredictable?

Step 1: Teach students that the ability to learn is not a fixed quantity

The key to a student's ability to become a self-regulated (i.e., metacognitive) learner is understanding that one's ability to learn is a skill that develops over time rather than a fixed trait, inherited at birth.

Step 3: Give students opportunities to practice self-monitoring and adapting

In particular, students are encouraged to think about the key points of the lecture as they listen and take notes. At the end of the lecture, students write what they think the three most important ideas of the lecture were on an index card.

Teaching Self-Monitoring Strategies

Monitoring and adapting strategies can be taught as learning habits. A wrapper is one tool for teaching self-monitoring behavior. A wrapper is an activity that surrounds an existing assignment or activity and encourages metacognition. For example, wrappers can be used with lectures, homework assignments, or exams. Wrappers require just a few extra minutes of time, but can have a big impact.

Example: homework wrappers

Before beginning a homework assignment, students answer a brief set of self-assessment questions focusing on skills they should be monitoring. Students complete the homework as usual, and then answer a follow-up set of self-assessment questions.

Example: exam wrappers

When graded exams are returned (as soon as possible after the exam was given), students complete an exam reflection sheet. They describe their study strategies, analyze the mistakes they made, and plan their study strategies for the next exam.

"Metacognition is a critically important, yet often overlooked component of learning. Effective learning involves planning and goal-setting, monitoring one's progress, and adapting as needed. All of these activities are metacognitive in nature. By teaching students these skills - all of which can be learned - we can improve student learning. There are three critical steps to teaching metacognition:"

Really useful reminder of how we need to address very basic ideas about how to absorb new information and ask students to self-monitor and push themselves. I appreciated the information and plan to incorporate the wrappers!

"You are a college professor. I have just retired as a high school teacher. I have some bad news for you. In case you do not already see what is happening, I want to warn you of what to expect from the students who will be arriving in your classroom, even if you teach in a highly selective institution."

In these last days of April, I wanted to acknowledge the yin and yang that this month represents for my discipline. April is National Poetry Month, but it is also the time of year when students in grades 3-8 take their ELA and math New York State exams. The irony of this is not lost on us English teachers.

STAAR replaced the four tests previously required for graduation with fifteen—more than any other state. Lawmakers also mandated that the new tests, known as end-of-course exams, would count for 15 percent of a student’s grade in each subject area

Of course, the stakes are high not just for kids but for adults too. Teachers whose students fail to improve—or don’t improve sufficiently—can find themselves out of a job. Students at poor-performing schools can transfer to better schools in their district—and take their state funding with them.

Shortly before he resigned as education commissioner, Robert Scott warned that assessment and accountability had grown into something akin to a “military-industrial complex,” a kind of public policy juggernaut with its own internal momentum.

Whether or not learning the word ‘commission’ is appropriate for second graders could be debated—I personally think it is a bit over the top. What is of deeper concern, however, is that during a time when 7 year olds should be listening to and making music, they are instead taking a vocabulary quiz.

Real learning occurs in the mind of the learner when she makes connections with prior learning, makes meaning, and retains that knowledge in order to create additional meaning from new information. In short, with tests we see traces of learning, not learning itself.

Teachers are engaged in practices like these because they are pressured and afraid, not because they think the assessments are educationally sound. Their principals are pressured and nervous about their own scores and the school’s scores. Guaranteed, every child in the class feels that pressure and trepidation as well.

I am troubled that a company that has a multi-million dollar contract to create tests for the state should also be able to profit from producing test prep materials. I am even more deeply troubled that this wonderful little girl, whom I have known since she was born, is being subject to this distortion of what her primary education should be.

So while it is an exaggerated work of fiction, lets look to Miss Bonkers and the school in Diffendoofer for guidance. Yes we need standardised testing to check progress and assess learning. Yes we need to see if our students are performing to a standard that is accepted across the country. But we do not have to teach the content of a test or how to take a test. We need to teach them how to THINK.

researchers found they could pick out the best teachers in a school and even predict roughly how much their students would learn if they rated the educators through a formula that put equal weight on student input, test scores and detailed classroom observations by principals and peers

Judging teachers primarily by student performance on state tests, for instance, turned out to be highly unreliable, with little consistency from year to year. Judging them chiefly by a principal's observations failed to identify those teachers who could be counted on to boost student proficiency on state math and reading tests.

"(Reuters) - Effective teachers can be identified by observing them at work, measuring their students' progress on standardized tests - and asking those students directly what goes on in the classroom, according to a comprehensive study released Tuesday."